Rex Murphy (surely one of the best ironic columnists around) has a column in The Globe and Mail on Ouellet’s stamp is cancelled which starts with the inscription on the Central Post Office building in New York which we all know the start of: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” What is interesting is that this is an adaptation of Herodotus and Rex reminds us that communications technologies often present themselves as heroic and honourable when they are launched. Surface mail today seems outdated and far from the heroic braving of the elements.
Perhaps we are in the age of dialogue, when only communication is a virtue. Thus the work of developing and delivering communication replaces other careers as honourable.
Here is a quote from Rex Murphy,
The message of both (the US post inscription and the original from Herodotus), though, is inescapable: the honour, the singular worthiness, that belongs to the task of human communication, and those who enable it.
The telephone, the telegraph, and much closer to our time, the myriad of devices with which we chatter or type, and principally the great germ of e-mail, have greatly displaced the centrality, utility and prestige of the post. A real letter, something written, addressed, stamped and dropped in the box, is scorned as “snail mail.”
In an on-line universe, in these days of fax, text-messaging, and the computer, the post office has lost all its aura, most of its indispensability, and much of its utility. Its association with government is as strong as ever, though.
…
A great service has greatly dwindled, overleaped by technology and more associated with high-profile patronage than the heroic couriers of Herodotus. The glory of the great motto is exhausted.
Do we who work in the university not feel some of this worthiness? Here is another quote from the same column,
The mail is a modern institution, “modern” as dating say roughly from when Pamela, the novel I mentioned last week, was published in 1740. Pamela was very much a postal-service novel, being built on the idea of an exchange of letters, a new technique for a then-new form, and the postal service hovers over our language like a muse. The profession of Letters owes much to the profusion of letters. The university English department is, in no small measure, a post-post department.
In other words, we are all “post-post”.
For the previous column on Pamela see Pamela, abreast of new fiction – one of his funniest.